5.3 No brand, no organisation – WMtE part 5

We were sitting in Judy’s car, driving through the beautiful New England landscape, returning home after our sixth gathering of Women Moving the Edge at the Essex Conference Center and wondering what would be next. Neither of us had a sense of calling a next gathering. Then what? Both of us, as co-initiators, had alternately called the previous gatherings in our local areas. It kept us traveling between Europe and the US, enabling different women from both continents to participate.

We had already learned to rely on sensing, on inner impulses aligned with signs from outside – and not on planning. This was an emergent process that could not be constrained by a timeline, not even by our personal preferences. There was no sense in repeating or scaling up. As Helen had put it: “… the scaling up thing… going from small to big… there is a danger in this ‘spreading best practices business’, because you are losing out on the experimentation. It is all about experimenting with the practice in relationship with the local context. It relates with the energy of experimenting, staying in inquiry, sensing from source, rather than moving something from one space to another.”

This was an organic, unfolding process and we were riding the wave: a continuous process of sensing and acting, sensing and acting… over and over. Christopher Alexander, describing how buildings acquire a timeless quality of beauty over hundreds of years, calls this the “moving and stopping that creates wholeness”. Dave Snowden, discussing how to deal with complex situations, names it: probe, sense and act. According to Snowden, what comes out of this iterative process is not best practice, or even good practice, but emergent practice, something altogether new and unique.

So, faithful to our practice, we refrained from planning and waited. It was not long before other women and places started to call us to hold a next gathering. We tried to stay in the not-knowing-yet and moved from one edge to the next. We had no desire to make something happen, learning to trust the flow on ever deeper levels. And this practice brought us to new discoveries of exactly that: how to ride the wave as a collective. We were ready to move from being present to generating something new.

One further small challenge remained. Seeing our visibility grow, with specific inputs into some global initiatives, we needed to sense our role and place in that bigger field. There was some temptation to fall into the widespread pattern of naming or claiming Women Moving the Edge – as a kind of brand – in some collaborative initiatives, but our central purpose was clear: to remain in the inquiry to move the edge of consciousness. So no brand and no organisation.